Review (book): John Lennon

Memories of John Lennon. Edited and Introduced by Yoko Ono.
New York: HarperEntertainment. 310 pp. $25.00
Book Review Written by Tom Wilmeth; May 2006

Her Broadway play about John flopped. As such, Yoko must now feel a renewed urgency to remind the world of his importance. She does this badly in a completely superfluous book, inviting a myriad of people with famous names to wax-on about her late husband. The results are mixed, at best. Klaus Voormann does provide some insight as to what a relaxed Lennon must have been like with an old friend, comfortable at home in New York. More often, celebrity speakers themselves seem self-conscious as they acknowledge that they have nothing to say, and so offer unremarkable accounts about how they heard of John’s death. At the low end of this misguided valentine is author Jim Henke, who claims a lifelong total oneness with Lennon (whom he never met), and Donovan’s massive ego trip concerning how John begged Leitch to teach him finger-picking guitar style. As John might say, “Absolute rubbish.”